Royane Real
Is Making Friends Hard For You?
By Royane Real
Author of “Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends”
Do you ever have trouble knowing how to make friends with other people? If friendship is hard for you, you may have concluded that making friends is a very difficult and mysterious process.
It’s true that there are some mysteries about making friends, just as there are mysteries and unexpected results in all human relationships. We can’t predict everything, and we can't control the outcome.
For example, you may meet a person with whom you seem to have everything in common. Even though you use all your best conversation tricks and listening tactics, nothing seems to work. There is no spark.
Although the two of you might have a conversation that seems to be all right on the surface, neither of you seems to have any desire to develop a relationship or to see each other again. Something seems to be missing.
And yet, even though this relationship has no spark at the beginning it does not mean that all hope for a friendship is lost. If you see this person often enough and if you keep talking, it is possible that over a long period of time, whatever invisible barriers seem to be keeping you apart, may eventually dissolve.
In a case like this, you will have to keep making an effort if you want a friendship to blossom.
There are many cases of deep friendships and even romantic relationships that eventually developed just because the two people had to keep seeing each other and talking on many occasions, even though there was no interest in each other to begin with.
If you have a conversation with someone and it seems to go nowhere, don’t worry about it too much, and don’t criticize yourself for it. It’s possible that the two of you are not really suited to become good friends. But it’s also possible that if you keep trying in a small but persistent ways, that eventually the two of you will find more to talk about and more to admire in each other.
I have a close relative who claims to have no friends. This is in spite of the fact that people seem to really like him, and most of his social skills are fine.
In this case, it appears that when people want to become to close to him, he emotionally runs away. He turns down all invitations from other people to socialize and he never initiates any conversations. He claims that he is shy, but he also appears to have poor self esteem.
He seems to have a self image that says he is supposed to be lonely, and he acts in a way to fulfill his self image as a lonely person.
If making friends is a problem for you, check and see what stage of the friendship making process seems to give you the most trouble. Do you need to learn some social skills, or do you need to have more self confidence and self acceptance?
Is it the beginning stages where you must make some effort to talk to people you don’t know? Or do you have difficulty with the later stages where you must respond to the efforts other people make to get closer to you? Or do you have trouble simply knowing how to be a good, supportive friend to other people?
We all have aspects of ourselves that we need to improve.
The rewards will include having much better emotional connections with other people, and more peace of mind.
( The article above is by Royane Real, author of the popular book “Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends” You can learn more about how to create good friendships in my book available at http://www.lulu.com/real )
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